International relief workers poured into this earthquake-devastated city Sunday, finding rotting bodies and whole areas destroyed. They struggled to provide water, shelter and medical supplies to desperate survivors of a city that now barely exists.
With hopes for finding anyone alive in the rubble fading, teams from countries including the United States scaled back search-and-rescue efforts and turned their attention to the thousands of survivors, many homeless and bereaved.
With the influx of assistance, the tiny airstrip that serves Bam, an ancient backwater on the Silk Road, was clogged.
State-run television said 16,000 people had been buried in the three days since the predawn quake in what had been a city of 80,000. Estimates of the final toll have bobbed up and down imprecisely, but Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari said, “I believe the number of dead will go beyond 20,000.”
At Heaven of Zahra, Bam’s main cemetery, bulldozers dug long trenches for mass graves. A 29-year-old man brought the bodies of his brother, his sister-in-law and her three children in a truck, saying he just wanted them to rest in peace.
“There is no time for anything, we have too many dead and the bodies are getting rotten,” he said.
With the decay came fear of an epidemic spread. Aid workers and most survivors wore masks Monday.
Bam was dealing with other ills too, including looters, which prompted police to set up checkpoints and stop cars to check identity papers.
With relief convoys coming to the Bam airstrip, at one point the jam grew so intense that both that airport and the larger airfield in the nearby provincial capital of Kerman were closed. Domestic flights for relief workers were canceled or left idling on the ground in Tehran, waiting for clearance to take off.
The disaster in Bam was so concentrated and intense that attention has focused only on the city. The surrounding areas, with 110,000 people, have largely been left on their own.
Ali Shafei, the governor of Bam, told the local Kerman radio Sunday that aid workers reached the town of Barvat, 8 miles away, only on Saturday.
“We need to build Bam from scratch,” he said.
The city still does not have power or running water.
But for the living, the immediate physical situation appeared to improve markedly Sunday. The mostly orderly streets were clogged with volunteers and residents loading salvaged belongings onto trucks to carry north. Soldiers with shovels on their shoulders marched in single file.
And after complaining of an inadequate response in the first 48 hours after the quake, Bam residents appeared awash in emergency rations. Residents and volunteers walked around cases of tea abandoned on a sidewalk that doubled as a residential zone. The street opposite the cemetery was littered with donated clothing. At a wire-mesh window where blankets were being handed out, women sent clerks back, demanding a different color.
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“I think most of the people still in Bam have got a six-month supply of food now,” said Ali Moradi, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer leading the relief effort in the city. “Where we have a problem is with distribution. That has been uneven.”
Still, relief officials said tents and blankets remained in short supply, particularly in the outlying villages where many houses were severely damaged by the 6.7-magnitude temblor. But fears faded of widespread fatalities in those rural areas.
Officials explained that, although the epicenter was a few miles outside Bam, in many cases villagers were saved because their houses had been made from wood, more available in the countryside than in town. Even if they collapse, wooden houses tend to fall with much less force than the unreinforced brick homes that crumbled across Bam.
Through much of the city, two-story commercial structures as often as not survived the quake. The catastrophic damage was done to homes.
“The houses had steel in them, but they were not designed to withstand an earthquake,” said Maheri Alizadeh, 52, who lost 50 relatives. “Why shouldn’t the government make sure that these houses are built properly in a country like here where earthquakes are so frequent?” she said, sobbing.
On the darkened, eucalyptus-lined streets of Bam, the scene was eerie. Residents wandered late into the night as if in a daze, still weeping at the magnitude of their losses.
“We feel pain, pain,” said Kobrah Abbasi Nejad, 53, roaming past the fires flickering in a downtown traffic circle about 2 a.m. Monday. Nejad, her husband and two children managed to escape their house when an exterior wall fell away, but four grown children perished when the roof collapsed on them.
“My body aches. We can’t sleep,” she said, tears coursing down her cheeks into the folds of her flowing chador. “We wish we had been killed, not them. They were so young.”